Scammers made over $3 million by sending fake iPhones to get authentic ones

Two guys in Maryland who sent lots of fake iPhones to Apple for repairs, hoping to get real ones back, were found guilty by a federal jury on Tuesday, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. The men could now be looking at up to 20 years in prison.

Haotian Sun, a 33-year-old from Baltimore, and Pengfei Xue, a 33-year-old from Germantown, Maryland, got their hands on fake iPhones from Hong Kong starting in 2017, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Over the next two years, they sent about 5,000 of these phones to Apple and authorized service providers, even faking serial numbers to make sure they wouldn’t get caught.

Sun and Xue are from China, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but it’s not clear how long they’ve been in the U.S. They were found guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and mail fraud because they used the mail to carry out their scam.

In addition to faking serial numbers, the two guys used different names to try and hide what they were doing. The whole thing added up to about $3 million in fraud, according to the government.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kondi J. Kleinman and trial attorney Ryan Dickey from the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section were in charge of the case, according to a press release.

Last year, two brothers in San Diego, Zhimin and Zhiting Liao, got 41 months in prison for a similar scheme involving fake iPhones and iPads. They sold the real Apple products to people in other countries, as reported by the Times of San Diego.

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly has set Sun and Xue’s sentencing for June 21, according to reports.